Hello😊
I got my first tank a couple months ago. I started out with hornwort, fanwart, one trapdoor snail, and a few comets.
Well the comets died😕 Ich got a hold of them and treatment didn't even make a dent.
So now I have a plant and snail tank. I also noticed that eggs must have been on my plants when I brought them in from the pond. I now have well over 45 tinny tiny spiral snails in addition to two adult trapdoors and two new baby trapdoors.
All this in a 20gl Tank.
Just in the past week and a half brown (diatom?) algae has taken over. Before that it's been perfectly clean. I scrap the sides down weekly and vacuum 1/3-1/2 of the rock and change 20% of the water. Now I haven't clean it in a couple of weeks since seeing all the snails. I didn't want to remove their "food" since I have so many in there now. What should I do? Scrap, vacuum, and clean away knowing I'll loose snails in the process? Or just hope they can get a handle on the algae?
Or maybe just clean one side a week? Just curious if there is a right way to go about cleaning a snail tank.
I included a tank picture and a couple pictures of the larger spiral snails. Most of them are much smaller then that.